Usenet has always been like the proverbial blind people and the elephant... people uninterested in binaries are unlikely to agree that Usenet works "better" for the kind of content that it was destroyed for carrying.
A big reason why Usenet is still alive and kicking is thanks to piracy. The same applies to IRC (XDCC), but probably to a lesser extent.
Mutually reinforcing cycles that led to the current state of Usenet as a seedy backwater where it was once an essential part of the Internet (and the UUCP network before it).